Yesterday Cathay Pacific played a similar game on their Facebook and Instagram, having us guess their latest city. Their first picture made it pretty obvious the newest destination would be Boston based on the “red socks.”

However, based on their second picture it seemed they were trying to trick us, as it had a coffee cup with a picture of what looked like the Space Needle.

The flight will operate to Boston on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and will be operating from Boston on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

What’s surprising on the surface is that the flight will be operated by a four class 777, featuring:

6 first class seats

53 business class seats

34 premium economy seats

182 economy seats

But when you think about it that actually makes sense. Boston’s runway isn’t especially long so there’s a chance the flight might have to seasonally be weight restricted. As a result, flying the lighter/less dense aircraft makes sense, given that the plane has 75 fewer seats than the three class 777.

While Cathay Pacific is accepting reservations on the new flights, it doesn’t look like they’ve opened award seats yet.

It surprises me that Boston makes sense

I’m sure they’ve done their research, but it does surprise me that they’re picking Boston over Seattle. I was expecting them to launch Boston service when they get their Airbus A350s. There’s no doubt there’s a market there, but my assumption would have been that it’s a “long and thin” route, given that there’s not much connection potential there.

Meanwhile Seattle is a huge tech city, has a massive Asian population, is 1,500 miles shorter than the Boston route (so will have much lower operating costs), and is an Alaska hub, which is one of Cathay Pacific’s partners. On the surface it sure seemed like it had more going for it as a Cathay Pacific 777-300ER destination.

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About luckyBen Schlappig (aka Lucky) is a travel consultant, blogger, and avid points collector.
He travels about 400,000 miles a year, primarily using miles and points to fund his first class experiences.
He chronicles his adventures, along with industry news, here at One Mile At A Time.

Comments

Living in the NYC area, I do feel EWR has a unique market —- the United/Star Alliance market! 😉 I was thrilled when CX announced the new EWR service since mostly United and a handful of other airlines fly to EWR, with the majority of transpacific routes only going to JFK. For the past 15 years my family has flown UA/CO from EWR to Asia. It’s great that CX is now flying to EWR as well!

I live in Boston, and am not that surprised by this- but really excited!

There’s been huge foreign investment in Boston sprouting up over the last 2-3 years in the real estate sector. It’s estimated that as much as 30% of all real estate purchases in Boston will be by Asian investors.

Living in one of the main neighborhoods for awhile (North End), I can tell you that there’s a countless amount of foreign tourists from Mar-Dec, mostly of Asian descent.

I’d guess it also has to do with the plethora of colleges that are in the area that attract international talent.

I can see BOS over SEA. SEA already has a lot of flights to Asia plus the ever-growing non-alliance DL presence now. Seattle has a lot of tech stuff, but so does Boston and Boston is by far the educational capital of America which results in a significant tech presence and a lot of demand for US-Asia flights.

@ Mark — Did you miss the part where I said “I’m sure they’ve done their research.” I’m sure it’s the right decision, but I’m saying that without knowing the numbers it surprises me. Which isn’t to question their decision in any way…

I am not following this at all. But come this morning this is the post on my feebly top and I am super excited. Now I need to figure ways to get more aa miles. Could be clichy off topic but, Lucky: do you think applying new cards keeping this route in mind is going to be good or not. Since everyone is speculating devaluation post merger I am asking. TIA

DL already flies SEA-HKG with A330/B767, so maybe CX thought BOS is worth tapping into with all the other research/investment going on. And CX has far better onward frequencies into regional Asia than JL has over NRT.

I think CX probably looked at the two other non-stops to Asia that recently started out of Logan and saw that the load factors on those flights had met or exceeded expectations. ANA and Hainan’s ability to make Boston work probably helped convince CX that the market was feasible.

Somewhat off topic, I can confirm, as Bruno says, that Boston has seen a huge influx of real estate investment from Asia (mostly china). As someone looking to buy an apartment downtown, it is frustrating how many apartments end up being sold to Chinese investors/students for all cash offers.

Yeah, this makes sense to me. All the foreign investment and students, plus the fact that Boston has hardly any direct service to Asia currently. I would guess this is at least partly to do with the lack of service between Boston and mainland China in particular (especially Shanghai). It’s not easy to get from Boston to China, and a lot of people do fly those connecting routes. The only BOS-China flight is to Beijing on Hainan, and that’s very unlikely to change anytime soon. Cathay/Dragonair have tons of onward connections from HK to the mainland.

The EWR service could be considered a replacement service for Singpore Airlines. Many travelers on SQ 21/22 flew that route, not because it was the quickest way, but because EWR was less of a hassle and closer than JFK. If SQ had a 1 stop from EWR, and a nonstop from JFK, many people who perfected SQ 21/22 would still fly the EWR service, even if the time in the air was shorter. That’s probably why CX came in to EWR. For Cathay Pacific, Seattle sounds like the most logical destination, though they could be waiting for DL to test the market with their new route, before they jump into the market. As you mentioned, SEA has a large Asian population, but the problem is, is that HKG is way too far south in Asia for any connections to North Asia, so ICN, NRT, and PEK always win there. With South Asia, it could work, but many pax would prefer to fly to NRT/ICN/PEK and connect, because they are much shorter flights, so they can break it up a bit.

The CX forum on FlyerTalk has been discussing this flight since at least April, so it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise.

The interesting piece of news is the 4-cabin configuration. I suspect it’s due to a combination of weight restrictions and anticipated premium cabin demand to Boston. If you’re the kind of Chinese parent who can afford to send you kid to Harvard and buy them an expensive place to live, you probably don’t want to slum it in Business when going to visit. The question now is whether this route will be changed to the A350 when it launches, and if that plane will have a First cabin or not.

@Josh, I would love to see that, but I doubt that’s going to happen any time soon. There’s still a lot of uncertainty on how the new AA/US routes will change with the merger, and how much connecting traffic might go away.

That said, I would absolutely love it, other than the sad state of lounges in PHX T4. The new LAX OW lounge and TBIT is really nice, which makes the connection a bit more bearable.

It’s a long time coming. I was actually more surprised that the earlier announcement from CX was EWR-HKG, since that route from EWR was already dominated by UA. In any case I’m super happy about this announcement and can’t wait to try out this route later on. Not super thrilled about the time myself either, but I suppose it’s no worse than flying out to HKG from the West Coast (flight tends to be late evening/early AM).

Well Seattle may have a massive Asian population, but don’t forget Seattle already been served by a massive Asian flights already. OZ, KE, BR, NH, HU, with DL having 5 Asian flights that include HKG will be a direct competition. So if CX is going to add another flight, it won’t be able to fill up the seats not unless they have to sell lower price tickets constantly vs Boston only have JL and HU for Asian competitions.

When SQ pulled their nonstop EWR-SIN flight, that left 200 biz seat capacity reduction to SE Asia, for any given day.

CX, who has a shorter route to fly and a far more powerful connecting hub, came in and addressed that market. Their timings don’t really compete with UA117, which departs nearly a half day earlier.

As for BOS, it should be interesting. I would’ve figured a lower-cost carrier who tends to specialize more on VFR traffic (e.g. BR, CI, OZ, etc) would’ve moved in first, but apparently CX feels it can get the yield it wants out of this city, with such a comparatively short runway. We shall see.

What a lot of people don’t realize is the size of the metro areas just outside of the Boston area. Just 40-45 min south of Boston, Providence and surrounding cities and towns add well more than 1.5 million people to the mix. Throw in Worcester, southern New Hampshire, areas of Cape Cod, as well as eastern Connecticut, giving Logan a reach of 8 million people. The market is definitely there and will continue to grow. With Logan filling up, we may even see airports like T.F. Green benefit from potential overflow, as it is far less congested and far cheaper for airlines to land there.

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